Reflections provoked by Michael Banton'sJohn Rex's main mistake

Abstract

Banton's article provoked a number of reflections on working with John Rex in the 1960s. The idea of race has a long history both in human relations and sociological theory. But the possibility of there being a specific field of 'race relations' remains contested. Ideas of race and ethnicity are elided in public discourse, making the resolution of linguistic issues in the field especially difficult and as yet unresolved. These reflections touch upon the political environment in which John Rex's earlier writing on race was conducted and upon the breadth of influences upon a sociologist rooted in the classical tradition, especially the sociology of Max Weber.It was a pity that Michael Banton left the quotation from Popper that explained his use of the word 'mistakes' until the fifth page of his article. The inadequacies of our pursuit of knowledge and understanding are not the result of mistakes or errors unless we have seriously misread a text or miscalculated a statistic. As academics, we work (often struggle) within the constraints of our times, drawing upon our intellectual inheritance while debating with our contemporaries. As Banton (2015, 1) himself puts it: 'Everyone has to start from the prevailing body of knowledge.' Some of the constraints of the mid-1960s were evident when the University of Durham founded the department of sociology with John Rex as head, and named it The Department of Social Theory and Institutions. Sociology was still not yet regarded as an entirely legitimate field of study in certain quarters. By the late 1960s, the department was undertaking a range of local and regional research projects with empirical work driven by theoretical debates. But a vocal element in the department (mainly but not exclusively postgraduates) had a threefold strategy for world transformation, the first element of which was 'smash the department of sociology'. 1 An additional challenge was that we were alleged not to be Marxist enough; John Rex's response to this latter charge was an attempt to focus the departmental seminar on reading Marx, especially the Grundrisse, which had just become available in English. This initiative came to nothing. The later assertion by certain members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies that one of their primary tasks was to destroy the work of John Rex was shrugged off. John Rex did not believe them to be up to the task.Many of us write in political circumstances that make our work unwelcome, but few of us have had to work against a background of such unrelenting hostility from